Years ago I read Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT. In the book, he relates a story about crossing the border from the US into Canada and a Border Patrol agent asking the value of his laptop. He said millions, not because of the hardware, but because of the data. I thought that was interesting, and I somewhat agree. The data I have on my machines, or really now, in cloud services, is more valuable than the hardware. The hardware is barely worth anything to me, including the time it takes to reinstall my applications, because I really treat my laptop as a piece of cattle. I could drop it, render it completely unusable and I’d be back up, running, and productive with new hardware in less than 4 hours.

Then I saw this article on ransoming data for iCloud users, where the request is for US$75,000. This is for Apple itself and not individuals, but what if it were for each user? What would I pay to avoid losing all the data on my mobile device?

It certainly wouldn’t be $75,000 despite the fact I think some of the data I have is precious. I love the pictures and video of my family most of all, but if I lost some of them, maybe all of the digital storage, would I just pay a ransom? Probably not. What about all the code in a VCS for my company? Would we pay a ransom for that? Likely we would, though perhaps not. We might think about reconstructing the code, especially if we were a small company.

Ultimately I think there isn’t a lot of money to be made with individuals’ data. Too many of us older folks remember when we did lose physical objects and they were just gone. The idea of losing things is painful, but not inconceivable. For younger people, it seems that much of the data we produce and consume is transient and isn’t necessarily that valuable to us. My kids love Snapchat for the ability to create and lose memories. I dislike it for the same reason.

Much of the data we personally have can be backed up, and possibly recreated if it isn’t. Many of our digital records have the characteristic that while we may have a copy, often some business or organization has another copy. Requesting new data is easy, and while it might cost some time and money, it may be preferable to the idea of paying a ransom, and potentially having to continue to pay again in the future with some virus still on our systems.

I don’t quite know what to think about ransomware and how this might evolve. I suspect that this will always be a problem in some way, just as hardware failures will likely plague us forever. The only solution I have is to create backups regularly that contain versions, and can be restored to separate, clean devices. I’ve gotten away from my own personal offline backups, mostly because of data size, but I do continue to try and keep at least 2 or 3 backups going to different locations and with different services because my data is at least that important.